HW & Anor v Bedfordshire County Council & Anor

A statement of special educational needs must define the child’s needs and specify the provision required to meet them. A tribunal determining an appeal must address central issues raised by the parties. A general reference to a package of care is insufficient where the provision required is not identified, or the means and responsible persons for determining it are not specified. Where the choice between schools is justified by avoiding unreasonable public expenditure, the tribunal must have sufficient information to make a proper comparison of the relevant costs.

The parents of a profoundly disabled child brought a statutory appeal under section 326 of the Education Act 1996 against a decision of the Special Educational Needs Tribunal concerning the contents of his statement of special educational needs. The Tribunal preferred a day school, Ridgeway, to the residential school, St Mary’s, although the evidence indicated that the child required educational provision outside ordinary school hours and that Ridgeway could not provide the provision available at St Mary’s.

The central issues were whether the Tribunal had adequately addressed the need for out-of-hours provision and whether the statement specified the provision required to meet the identified needs.

1. The appeal was allowed. The Tribunal’s decision was quashed and the matter was remitted to a fresh tribunal.
2. A statement of special educational needs must both define the child’s needs and specify the means by which those needs are to be met. The Tribunal failed to address the central issue of educational provision outside school hours, despite that issue being raised by the parents and accepted in evidence by the local authority.
3. A reference to a package of care does not itself specify the provision required to meet an identified need. The contents of the package must be identified, or at least the means by which, and the persons by whom, its contents are to be determined.
4. The statement did not fulfil those requirements. The evidence showed that Ridgeway could not provide the package of care previously available at St Mary’s. The defects were sufficiently grave to require quashing and remission.
5. The Tribunal had also compared the cost of Ridgeway with the cost of St Mary’s when applying section 9 of the Education Act 1996. Since the cost of social-services provision that would be required if the child attended Ridgeway was unknown, it was unclear whether the Tribunal had sufficient information to make the comparison required by section 9.
6. The court expressly left undecided whether unreasonable public expenditure under section 9 is confined to the local authority’s education budget or may include expenditure by another department of the same authority.

The judgment describes a statutory appeal from the Special Educational Needs Tribunal’s decision dated 20 November 2003. The Administrative Court allowed the appeal, quashed that decision and remitted the matter to a fresh tribunal.